Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media

Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, Jonathan R. Topham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351946841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Written by literary scholars, historians of science, and cultural historians, the twenty-two original essays in this collection explore the intriguing and multifaceted interrelationships between science and culture through the periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging across the spectrum of periodical titles, the six sections comprise: 'Women, Children, and Gender', 'Religious Audiences', 'Naturalizing the Supernatural', 'Contesting New Technologies', 'Professionalization and Journalism', and 'Evolution, Psychology, and Culture'. The essays offer some of the first 'samplings and soundings' from the emergent and richly interdisciplinary field of scholarship on the relations between science and the nineteenth-century media.

Part I
Women, Children, and Gender

Chapter 1
Green-Stocking or Blue? Science in Three Women’s Magazines, 1800–50

Ann B. Shteir

In February 1817, the Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex ran two letters about the Green-Stocking Club, a group newly formed by women who opposed the intellectual activities and aims of blue-stockings. The club's secretary, Grace Greenwax, stigmatized learned women as pitiable old maids and unsexed beings who had chosen 'to resign all the dear privileges' of their sex for the 'proud prerogatives of the other'. 'I have my doubts', she wrote, 'whether our sex was created merely to tread the subtle paths of science, or entangle themselves in the knotty disputations of metaphysical theory'. Society's problems need to be solved, she continued, but 'there also are such things as puddings, and it is as necessary they should be made; for, without the latter, the improvement of the human mind will make but a short progress'. The letter proceeded to detail the social disruption that Green-Stocking Club members believed would result from any blurring of male and female domains:

If our sex [...] will leave making puddings to solve problems [...] the other sex must, from necessity, take the opposite course: and a Newton in the nursery, a Locke in the laundry, a Pope in the pantry, and a Kaimes in the kitchen, would cut such sorry figures we should soon discover that Principia and pap; literature and linen; poetry and pickles; criticism and cookery, agree so very ill together, that if the ladies made as many blunders in their assumed departments, an absolute chaos would come again.

Forging close links between gender ideology and science, the correspondent therefore exhorted women readers of the Lady's Magazine to be not blue but 'green', to know their place and be, as she put it, in the kitchen rather than in the botanical garden.¹

Grace Greenwax's castigation of female intellectual interests in 1817, with its sharp exclusion of women from the world of science, contrasts with efforts during the Enlightenment to bring Newton into the nursery, and natural philosophy and natural history into the lives of women through the medium of magazines and introductory books. During the late eighteenth century, women in blue-stocking circles in England, and other women too, had participated in informal activities in natural philosophy and natural history. Interested in learning about 'science' in the sense of 'knowledge', and also about specific areas of natural knowledge, they read and conversed for purposes of sociability and mental and moral improvement. Their keen attention to learnedness is an unmistakable feature of Enlightenment cultural history. Yet during the second decade of the nineteenth century the Lady's Magazine adopted a different voice, one that took a firmly domestic tack associated with Hannah More and other anti-revolutionary writers on female education during the social and political turmoil of the 1790s and in the ensuing years. It is possible that the letters about the Green-Stocking Club were a joke, for the rules and practices that Grace Greenwax described have a suspiciously satiric excess. Nevertheless, in her determination to write women out of the life of the mind, she reflected the tone of public discussion at a time of backlash against assertive and independent women. Fuelled in part by conservative values, and in part by Romantic claims about 'natural' female sensibilities, the Green-Stocking letters in the widely read Lady's Magazine speak to a cultural climate during years when domestic roles for women were being strongly enforced, and when intellectual women were more often ridiculed than revered.²

Then, as now, magazines for a female audience registered tensions about women and gender, and made visible various ideologies and contradictions of their time. In recent years historians of women's magazines have tracked periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inspired particularly by interest from women's studies and cultural studies. They have read for content, and have probed how magazines reflect, promote, and also resist roies and values for female audiences. They have also analysed the development of periodicals as a literary form and explored how women readers, writers, and editors used magazines for their own purposes.³ To date, however, historical research on women's magazines has ignored science. Yet science is as suitable a thread for exploring this cultural terrain as advice, fashion, or romance, subjects that might seem more obvious to readers of women's magazines in our day. It should not surprise us to find science discussed in magazines directed to 'ladies' of fashion across the middle and upper social ranks when periodical publishing began to flower in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. La Belle Assemblée (1806–32) and the British Lady's Magazine (1815–19) published essays, letters, book reviews, and reports relating to the sciences that illustrate this trend. My discussion here focuses on other periodicals, two that span the opening decades and one that dates from the century's midpoint; the Lady's Magazine (1770–1832), the Lady's Monthly Museum (1798–1828), and the first volume of the Ladies' Companion at Home and Abroad from 1849 to 1850. None of these three magazines is a univocal cultural text, for different and often contrasting voices shared the same space over the publication spans of the journals, and the journals themselves underwent changes in editor and editorial emphasis. The Lady's Magazine and the Lady's Monthly Museum were monthlies that addressed genteel readers with leisured and aristocratic aspirations. The Ladies' Companion, a Saturday weekly, gave prominence to domestic and middle-class matters with more of a tone of focused household management. Whereas the Lady's Magazine was under male editorial control, the Lady's Monthly Museum came from 'a Society of Ladies', and the Ladies' Companion was firmly under the named editorship of one woman, Jane Loudon. Despite such differences, all three journals show the imprint of gender norms in how editors, correspondents, and other contributors shaped material about female education, general learning, and the place of science in the lives of girls and women. They portray science as serviceable to women, either because it contributes to moral improvement or because it has application to women's domestic lives.

Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex

For several decades prior to the first appearance of this magazine in 1770 periodicals had addressed a female audience across and above the middle ranks. Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator from the mid-1740s and Charlotte Lennox's Lady's Museum from the early 1760s successfully blended instruction and amusement in a mix of expository natural history essays and moral fiction, all infused with mid-century gender norms about modesty, duty, and family. The Lady's Magazine followed this model, and promised in the introductory address to the opening issue, in August 1770, that 'Every branch of literature' would be 'ransacked to please and instruct the mind'.⁴ Over the next sixty years readers found light fiction, poetry, advice columns, sewing patterns, recipes, letters from readers, music, extracts from literary publications, and foreign and domestic news. The Lady's Magazine became the longest lived and most popular magazine that addressed women as its primary audience before the Victorian era. With a mixture of genres and a wide and varied range of authors it established the magazine, in Margaret Beetham's words, 'as the periodical form for women and developed the basic pattern it still retains'.⁵

Throughout its history the editors of the Lady's Magazine encouraged women's access to knowledge, and made science part of the instructional tenor of the publication. The annual programmatic 'Address to the Public' often applauded science as an amusing and instructive activity and recommended it as a subject for reading. On one occasion, the editors intimated that women would prefer to read about science than to read 'superficial and frivolous' materials which could 'convey no information, nor even afford entertainment, but to an uncultivated or a vitiated taste'.⁶ Some tensions were nonetheless evident between calls for women to 'cultivate the faculties of the mind' and assumptions about female delicacy and refinement. For example, the editors asserted: '[w]e shall continue carefully to exclude every thing tending to licentiousness or immorality; nor shall we perplex our Fair Readers with the profound researches of abstract science, or disgust them with the violence of politics or the furious recriminations of contending factions'.⁷ Because of this editorial policy, astronomy and natural philosophy were generally omitted.

Natural history, by contrast, featured prominently in the Lady's Magazine, and expository essays taught readers about birds and insects, frogs, and plants. From 1800 through 1805, a monthly series entitled 'The Moral Zoologist; or, Natural History of Animals' detailed the habits and characteristics of many animals. Ann Murry, an author of conduct books and science textbooks, wrote the first fifty essays in the series, blending science and religion into broad lessons for life. The aim of the series, she explained, was 'to form a moral zoological system, tending to improve the understanding, by drawing the ideas to their proper uses—the contemplation of the great Author of Nature'. Murry used the familiar narrative form of letters from an older woman to a young noblewoman, and charted the 'regular gradations' of Creation, from man to quadrupeds. She drew lessons about divine wisdom and moral purpose from the descriptions and many illustrative plates of such animals as monkeys, cats, squirrels, camels, and elephants. The beaver, for example, was 'a symbol of native architecture'. 'Are not their edifices', Murry asked, 'subjects of more stupendous wonder than the most costly palaces; the regularity of their operations a reproach to dissipated men?'.⁸ Concurrent with 'The Moral Zoologist', the Lady's Magazine also published an expository series about Linnaean botany. Written by Robert Thornton, an entrepreneurial botanist whose voluptuous visual work the Temple of Flora appeared in 1807, 'Botany for Ladies' (1805–07) defined botanical terms and gave short and simple didactic accounts of Linnaean systematics. These were further elucidated by illustrations of the parts of flowers. Thornton focused particularly on the descriptive language of botany, and sought to situate botany as a science for women. In the opening essay of March 1805 he observed: 'the science of Botany is rendered so extremely te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND GENDER
• PART II: RELIGIOUS AUDIENCES
• PART III: NATURALIZING THE SUPERNATURAL
• PART IV: CONTESTING NEW TECHNOLOGIES
• PART V: PROFESSIONALIZATION AND JOURNALISM
• PART VI: EVOLUTION, PSYCHOLOGY, AND CULTURE
• Index